Video – D.H. Lawrence: A Digital Pilgrimage

May 1, 2023June 30, 2023 James Walker letters, literary locations, Locating Lawrence, Video

Locating Lawrence: May 1923

In these monthly videos, we are locating D.H. Lawrence 100 years ago via his letters. Mexico is not safe and never will be, he reasons. But at least they are not attached to money and possessions…

Lawrence has found ‘a little house…on Lake Chapala[i]’ which is a couple of hours away from Guadalajara. It has ‘trees and flowers… bananas in the garden’ and despite being hot is ‘not uncomfortably so’ meaning he is able to ‘live out of doors on the verandahs in very little clothing[ii]’. He can ‘read Spanish fairly well[iii]’ on account of living with a Spanish family and embraces the culture by requesting a copy of Bernal Diaz’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain – all five volumes[iv]

Frieda joins him at the beginning of the month and is delighted to have a base once more. But how long this will last is down to the temperament of her husband. ‘You’ll think I do nothing but change my plans,’ Lawrence writes to John Middleton Murry. ‘I can’t help it. I go out to buy my ticket to New York and Europe, then don’t buy it.[v]’ This may explain why he rents the house ‘by the month[vi]’. Various explanations are offered for his dithering. One is related to health ‘When I feel sick I want to go back. When I feel well I want to stay.[vii]’ Another is down to uninspiring correspondence, ‘when I get letters from Europe then I never want to go back.[viii]’But really his length of stay is determined by one thing, writing. ‘It will end, I suppose, in my staying as long as it takes me to write a novel.[ix]’ By the end of the month he has written ten chapters[x] of what will become The Plumed Serpent.

No matter how remote his location, Lawrence knows everything that’s going on elsewhere. Bibbles, the dog he was loaned during the Winter of 1922 has been returned to Ralph Miles[xi] and he knows that Mabel Dodge Sterne has just married Tony Luhan. Knud Merrild is instructed ‘Please write me the most interesting points of gossip concerning the event.[xii]’ Frieda is more empathetic towards Mabel, reasoning ‘she has failed somehow in her life, but then it is so easy to fail.[xiii]’

Lawrence’s sympathies are with Thomas Seltzer who must be ‘snowed under’ dealing with the ongoing ‘Judge Ford business[xiv]’. His crime? Publishing ‘unclean’ books, one of which is Women in Love. Another concern relates to a very pedantic but helpful reader, Louis Feipel, who writes to inform Lawrence of typos in Sea and Sardinia, Kangaroo, and now The Captain’s Doll. Lawrence thanks him and promises ‘I will try to mend my ways…remembering your eye is on every dot[xv]’

Mexico is not safe, and Lawrence is convinced it ‘will never be safe[xvi]’ Somebody tried to break in one night and so ‘we have a young man with a pistol sleep on the terrace outside the door[xvii]’ This means ‘I am not allowed to walk alone outside the narrow precincts of the village: for fear of being stopped, robbed, and what not. It gets awfully boring[xviii]’ This has the adverse effect of viewing everyone as a potential ‘rascal[xix]’ – not the kind of attitude you want when searching for Rananim.

But despite their various faults – ‘they are half civilised, half wild…are inwardly melancholy, live without hope, become suddenly cross, and don’t like to work’ – the Spaniards have a very redeeming characteristic they ‘are not greedy for money. And I find that wonderful, they are so little attached to money and possessions.[xx]’

To see other video essays from 1923 see our playlist here. To read from the original source, see The Cambridge Edition of The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol IV 1921 – 24 edited by Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield.

References

[i] Letter to Thomas Seltzer (L2809)

[ii] Letter to William Hawk (L2811)

[iii] Letter to Thomas Seltzer (L2819)

[iv] Letter to Idella Purnell (L2825)

[v] Letter to John Middleton Murry (L2810)

[vi] Letter to Emily King (L2813)

[vii] Letter to Kai Gotzsche and Knud Merrild (L2812)

[viii] Letter to Earl Brewster (L2822)

[ix] Letter to Thomas Seltzer (L2819)

[x] Letter to Baroness Anna von Richthofen (L2834)

[xi] Letter to William Hawk (L2811)

[xii] Letter to Kai Gotzsche and Knud Merrild (L2812)

[xiii] Letter to Bessie Freeman (L2833)

[xiv] Letter to Thomas Seltzer (L2809)

[xv] Letter to Louis N. Feipel (L2820)

[xvi] Letter to Thomas Seltzer (L2819)

[xvii] Letter to Adele Seltzer (L2824)

[xviii] Letter to Adele Seltzer (L2824)

[xix] Letter to Adele Seltzer (L2824)

[xx] Letter to Baroness Anna von Richthofen (L2834)

March 31, 2023June 30, 2023 James Walker letters, literary locations, Locating Lawrence, Video

Locating Lawrence: April 1923

In these monthly videos, we are locating D.H. Lawrence 100 years ago via his letters. After witnessing a bullfight and living with revolutionaries in Mexico, Lawrence wonders: Should I stay or should I go?

Lawrence was meticulous with money and ensured every debt was paid off and people were treated fairly. He sends his sister Emily £5 and enquires about the £10 forwarded to his father Arthur.[i] Likewise, Freida’s mother is sent £10 and £5 goes to her sister Else. Both families are treated equally. The Danish artists he spent the winter of 1922 with are informed ‘if ever you get really hard up, let me know at once.[ii]’ Money is to be shared when available.

Lawrence deals in specifics so you sense his frustration with Thomas Seltzer when he is told his royalties amount to about $4,000. ‘I don’t know what his ‘about’ means[iii]’ he complains to Robert Mountsier, his former American literary agent, but ensures he is paid his remaining commission.

He is furious at the thought of being swindled by Mitchell Kennerley, who, despite relinquishing the contract and copyright to Sons and Lovers, is still selling unsold stock of the book. ‘You will only succeed by fighting: and fighting again’ he informs Seltzer ‘black their eyes[iv]’.

Managing his own literary affairs is challenging when always on the move. ‘When I get to a place where I can unload my trunks, I will let you have what contracts I possess[v]’ he informs Curtis Brown. Mexico City is an early contender for home. It’s ‘very American on the one hand, and slummy on the other: a rather mongrel town.[vi]’ He enjoys excursions out to the pyramids at Teotihucan which ‘seem to have risen out of the earth[vii]’ but is appalled at a bull fight[viii].

Amy Lowell is informed ‘I would like to sit down and write a novel on the American continent. I don’t mean about it: I mean while I’m here.[ix]’ Some people go on holiday and sunbathe. Their tan evidence of their excursion. Lawrence follows a similar formula, except instead of lounging about, he writes a novel before he can move on. This is why he is able to dismiss previous locations. ‘Spit on Taos for me’ he informs Knud Merrild. ‘How glad I am I need not smell them anymore.[x]’

He’s offered a house[xi] by Zelia Nuttall (1858-1933) an American archaeologist and author of numerous books on Mexican history. Lawrence would repay her by featuring her as Mrs. Norris in The Plumed Serpent.

Mexico is devoid of the snobbery of England with ‘so few pretences of any sort[xii]’ But it’s also unsafe. There are ‘soldiers everywhere’ and ‘nearly all the big haciendas and big houses are ruins[xiii]’. There is the constant danger of being ‘robbed or murdered by roving bandits and scoundrels who still call themselves revolutionaries.[xiv]’

This may explain his rapid outburst to friends that ‘I’ve had enough of the New World[xv]’ and that he wanted to return to England because ‘what’s the good’ of being here ‘if one can’t live safely in the country?[xvi]’

This discontent of not knowing where he really wants to be is summed up perfectly in a letter to Amy Lowell.

‘I hesitate here.[xvii]’

References

[i] Letter to Emily King (L2782)

[ii] Letter to Kai Gotzsche and Knud Merrild (L2798)

[iii] Letter to Robert Mountsier (L2801)

[iv] Letter to Thomas Seltzer (L2773)

[v] Letter to Curtis Brown (L2795)

[vi] Letter to Nina Witt (L2772)

[vii] Letter to Nina Witt (L2772)

[viii] Letter to William Hawk (L2790)

[ix] Letter to Amy Lowell (L2796)

[x] Letter to Knud Merrild (L2779)

[xi] Letter to Bessie Freeman (L2777)

[xii] Letter to S.S. Koteliansky (L2775)

[xiii] Letter to Thomas Seltzer (L2774)

[xiv] Letter to Kai Gotzsche and Knud Merrild (L2798)

[xv] Letter to John Middleton Murry (L2787)

[xvi] Letter to Kai Gotzsche and Knud Merrild (L2798)

[xvii] Letter to Amy Lowell (L2796)

July 4, 2022June 30, 2023 James Walker letters, literary locations, Locating Lawrence, Modernism, Photo Essay, Video

Locating Lawrence: July 1922

He’s got no money, Ulysses is getting rave reviews, and Australia makes him feel like he’s fallen out of a picture and found himself on the floor staring back at the gods and men left behind in the picture. Welcome to Locating Lawrence, a monthly video based on Lawrence’s letters 100 years ago.

Katharine Susannah Prichard (nee Throssell) was a key figure in Australian literary history although Lawrence was not aware of the three novels she’d written when they corresponded on 3rd of July. She was also a founding member of the Communist Party in Australia, created in 1920, earning her the disparaging nickname of ‘The Red Witch’. Married to Hugo Throssell, a war hero awarded the Victoria Cross at Gallipoli, she proudly shared a newspaper clipping detailing the birth of their son, Ric. Lawrence observed ‘you are up and about wearing your little V.C like a medal at your breast’[i] Ric would also grow to become a writer as well as a diplomat, but his life would be marred by an unproven allegation that he was a Russian spy.

Lawrence confides to Prichard that there’s plenty to love about Australia and the fact he’s stayed for ‘three months in one place isn’t so bad’[ii]. But it’s a place he can never truly grasp as ‘I feel I slither on the edge of a gulf, reaching to grasp its atmosphere and spirit. It eludes me, and always would’.[iii] Once more he compares it to a Puvis de Chavannes painting, specifically ‘Winter’. But of most interest is Prichard’s rural life in Greenmount: ‘What do you grow on your land? My wife wants a little farm more than anything else, she says. But how should I sit still so long?’[iv]

He uses painting as a metaphor to S.S. Koteliansky to describe the peculiar impact Australia has had on him: ‘It is rather like falling out of a picture and finding oneself on the floor, with all the gods and men left behind in the picture’.[v]

Robert Mountsier is reminded twice in one paragraph that ‘I am now expecting your cable with the money’ as he is only able to get the Tahiti ‘if your cable money arrives’[vi] and that when he arrives in America ‘we will really sit still and spend nothing’[vii]. But he is aware of ‘the depressing accounts of sales’ with Sea and Sardinia selling 685 copies[viii] and Aaron’s Rod 3,000 copies[ix] – though he is keen to emphasise that this has nothing to do with Thomas Seltzer who ‘may be dodgy’ but ‘I believe he does his best.’[x]

Tortoises, 1921, Publisher’s Logo (Thomas Seltzer). Signature from “Best Russian short stories”, Thomas Seltzer, 1917. Superman comic.

Seltzer was Lawrence’s literary agent and helped bring him to an American audience, publishing his work between 1920 to 1923. Fighting censorship in the courts would eventually see his publishing company go bankrupt in 1923.

Lawrence reassures Mountsier that he only has two chapters left to complete Kangaroo and already his mind is focussing on the next location for inspiration (‘I should like, if I could, to write a New Mexico novel with Indians in it’[xi]). No wonder he is so averse to sitting still – his novels are born of perpetual momentum. It’s for this reason he must never get too settled. Thus, he confesses to Koteliansky, ‘If I stayed here for six months I should have to stay here forever.’[xii]

Mabel Dodge Sterne is updated with his desired living requests: ‘I wish we could settle down at – or near – Taos – and have a little place of our own, and a horse to ride. I do wish it might be like that.’[xiii]

Reading Lawrence’s letters, you can’t help but admire his incredible attention to detail. He is constantly wheeling, dealing and instructing. Robert Mountsier is informed that Kangaroo will be sent via the Makura on the 20^th July and that he should have it typed up ready for him when he arrives in America so that he can go through it again.[xiv]

In a letter to Mountsier on 17 July he enquires about a train strike in the USA (he is referring to the Great Railroad Strike that ran from 2 July to 14 September) and predicts ‘you will have bad Labour troubles in the next few years, amounting almost to revolution’. Seems not much has changed in 100 years. But Lawrence isn’t one for democratic solidarity, not when the unrest helps articulate his own frustrations with the public who have committed the cardinal sin of not buying enough of his books. ‘The ‘public’ that now is would never like me any more than I like it. And I hate it – the public – the monster with a million worm-like heads. No, gradually I shall call together a choice minority, more fierce and aristocratic in spirit.’[xv] Oh dear.

He strikes a calmer tone with the Brewsters, his Buddhist friends. Achsah is informed that the name of their property in Thirroul – Wyewurk – ‘was as Australian humourism Why Work?’[xvi] The house next door was called Wyewurrie! Frieda has finished a Buddha embroidery and has now moved onto a vase of flowers. It sounds like domestic bliss. But these were difficult times. He was aware that he would arrive in Taos penniless and that this was all too familiar. But this would not stop him embracing a new experience and adding another language to his repertoire: ‘I am now going to start learning Spanish, ready for the Mexicans.’[xvii]

When he arrives in America, he will have time to read ‘this famous Ulysses’.[xviii] James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece had been published in Paris in February 1922 by Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company and was receiving rave reviews. But Lawrence suspects his own novel, Kangaroo, will not receive the same adulation. If anything, ‘even the Ulysseans will spit at it’.[xix]

References

[i] Letter to Katherine Throssell, 3 July 1922

[ii] ibid

[iii] ibid

[iv] ibid

[v] Letter to S.S. Koteliansky, 9 July 1922

[vi] Letter to Robert Mountsier, 7 July 1922

[vii] Letter to Robert Mountsier, 17 July 1922

[viii] ibid

[ix] Letter to Thomas Seltzer, 18 July 1922

[x] Letter to Robert Mountsier, 17 July 1922

[xi] ibid

[xii] Letter to S.S. Koteliansky, 9 July 1922

[xiii] Letter to Mabel Dodge Sterne, 17 July 1922

[xiv] Letter to Robert Mountsier, 17 July 1922

[xv] ibid

[xvi] Letter to Achsah Brewster, 24 July 1922

[xvii] ibid

[xviii] Letter to S.S. Koteliansky, 9 July 1922

[xix] ibid

June 20, 2022June 30, 2023 James Walker letters, Locating Lawrence, Video

Locating D.H. Lawrence: May 1922

On 4 May 1922, Lawrence and Frieda disembarked from the Orsova in Western Australia. They stayed briefly in the east of Perth with Mollie Skinner for whom Lawrence would later collaborate on The Boy in the Bush (1924). A few weeks later they would head to Western Australia on the Malwa. Would Lawrence find happiness in Australia? Hmm.

His initial observation of Darlington, in a letter to Robert Mountsier, is that of a ‘queer godforsaken place: not so much new as non-existent’[i]. This is followed with the obligatory doubt of how long he will stay and a warning that he may need to cable for more money. At the time he was writing from the Savoy Hotel, Perth which he claims is the most expensive hotel he’s ever stayed in, and he will thus be leaving the next day. Despite money worries, he remains determined: ‘I’ll see this damned world, if only to know I don’t want to see any more of it. – Au revoir[ii].’

Mabel Dodge Sterne is informed they’ll be in Taos ‘easily by August’[iii] but this is unlikely given he has a whole new continent to explore.

On 15 May, Lawrence writes to his dear Schwiegermutter to inform that Frieda is ‘so disappointed’ as she’d hoped to find ‘much greater space and jollier people’[iv]in Oz. Lawrence’s descriptions of the bush are of an eerie liminal space. It is ‘hoary and unending, no noise, still, and the white trunks of the gum trees all a bit burnt: a forest, a preforest: not a primeval forest: somewhat like a dream, a twilight forest that has not yet seen a day. It is too new, you see: too vast. It needs hundreds of years yet before it can live’. He goes on to describe it as a ‘fourth dimension,’ ‘nervous, neurotic’ inhabited by ghosts[v].

He is slightly more appreciative when he writes to Jan Juta a few days later on 20 May: ‘Australia has a marvellous sky and air and blue clarity and a hoary sort of land beneath it, like a Sleeping Princess on whom the dust of ages has settled. Wonder if she’ll ever get up.[vi]’

It’s not somewhere he can imagine settling, unless he ever gave up ‘the literary sponge,’ and could ‘live in the bush for next to nothing’ and with ‘a great free land’ to boot[vii].

Although Lawrence ‘hated’ a great deal of his time in Ceylon – his previous location – on reflection he’s grateful for the experience and determined to visit the South Sea Isles or go around the world again and this time visit Africa, the Himalayas, China and Japan. ‘I love trying things and discovering how I hate them,’ he tells Earl Brewster.[viii]

Thomas Seltzer was keen for Lawrence to explore more widely and suggested India as a possible location for another Sea and Sardinia type publication with Jan Juta. But Lawrence ‘didn’t feel like it’[ix]. Amy Lowell had informed Lawrence that Seltzer was ‘getting a name as a merely erotic publisher’[x] and so venturing into travelogues may help offset this.

We learn in a letter to Koteliansky on 20 May that Frieda may not share Lawrence’s addiction to momentum: ‘Frieda wants to have a little house and stay a few months. She is tired of moving on. But I like it. I like the feeling of rolling on.’[xi]

And roll on they do, to Thirroul, 50 miles or so south of Sydney, where he takes a little house on the edge of the Pacific, ‘the weirdest place you ever saw’[xii]. Here, ‘the heavy waves break with a great roar all the time…the sky is dark, and it makes me think of Cornwall’[xiii]. Fortunately, it doesn’t cost much to live there, ‘food is quite cheap’ and ‘good meat is only fivepence or sixpence a pound’[xiv].

Soon the novelty starts to wear off. ‘I like Australia less and less. The hateful newness, the democratic conceit, every man a little pope of perfection[xv]’ he informs Robert Mountsier on 25 May. All of which would make good material for a novel…

References

[i] Letter to Robert Mountsier, 4-7 May 1922.

[ii] Letter to Robert Mountsier, 4-7 May 1922.

[iii] Letter to Mabel Dodge Sterne, 4-7 May 1922.

[iv] Letter to Baroness Anna von Richthofen, 15 May 1922.

[v] Letter to Baroness Anna von Richthofen, 15 May 1922.

[vi] Letter to Jan Juta, 20 May 1922.

[vii] Letter to Robert Mountsier, 26-30 May 1922.

[viii] Letter to Earl Brewster, 15 May 1922.

[ix] Letter to Jan Juta, 20 May 1922.

[x] Letter to Robert Mountsier, 26-30 May 1922.

[xi] Letter to Koteliansky, 20 May 1922.

[xii] Letter to Robert Mountsier, 28 May 1922.

[xiii] Letter to Baroness Anna von Richthofen, 30 May 1922.

[xiv] Letter to Baroness Anna von Richthofen, 30 May 1922.

[xv] Letter to Robert Mountsier, 25 May 1922.

January 31, 2022January 28, 2022 James Walker literary locations, Photo Essay, Video

Seething and Sardinia

In January 1921, D.H. Lawrence and the ‘Q-B’ left Sicily for Sardinia. Six weeks later Lawrence penned his infamous travel book in which he puts forward a series of fanciful claims about the country he spent a total of nine days in. Lawrence is literature’s number one mard arse, raging against everyone and everything. He has made moaning an art form. The late Kevin Jackson described him as ‘the John Cleese of literary modernism’ in an essay I commissioned for Dawn of the Unread and Geoff Dyer applied what can only be described as ‘method writing’ when he imitated Lawrence’s restlessness in Out of Sheer Rage. Lawrence, however, is also incredibly perceptive, intelligent, and poetic, a writer quite like no other – though not for everyone.

Having read Sea and Sardinia numerous times, not least to mark the centenary of its publication, I created the above video which references Lawrence’s comical raging. There are eleven references to rage in the book, most of which are triggered by impudence – which gets fourteen references.

The video was created in Canva, a graphic design template programme which has a simple drag and drop interface. It uses a fremium model, and so you might want to subscribe to unlock some of the special features, but so far, I’ve managed to cobble stuff together via the basic subscription. The animations are really useful, and you can upload your own images if you can’t find what they have in their database.

In terms of identifying patterns in literary texts, this has become a lot easier with digitisation. The book is out of copyright and available online so you can copy and paste it into Word to find key words. To think that once upon a time, I used to go through a book with a highlighter pen…

This is our 35th YouTube video. Check out the others at our YouTube channel D.H. Lawrence: A Digital Pilgrimage. If you like the book, you might want to take a look at Return to Sea and Sardinia, a film which retraces Lawrence’s steps via the vivid images of photographer-director Daniele Marzeddu.

September 1, 2021August 17, 2021 James Walker DH Lawrence Society, Film, NTU PLacements, Photo Essay, Project progress, Video

‘I was born in September, and love it best of all the months’

I first read Lawrence’s debut novel The White Peacock (1911) about five years ago. I remember being struck by the vivid descriptions of landscape and what felt like a reference to a flower, plant or tree on every page. Flowers will feature in some capacity as an artefact in the Memory Theatre and so I recently reread the book, but this time with a highlighter. As Cyril Beardsall drags you across the fields of Nethermere, you’re presented with a sensory overload that at times felt like it may induce hay fever. Here’s one such example:

“The evening scents began to awake, and wander unseen through the still air. An occasional yellow sunbeam would slant through the thick roof of leaves and cling passionately to the orange clusters of mountain-ash berries. The trees were silent, drawing together to sleep. Only a few pink orchids stood palely by the path, looking wistfully out at the ranks of red-purple bugle, whose last flowers, glowing from the top of the bronze column, yearned darkly for the sun.”

My intention is to create a YouTube video to capture the breadth of such references but given that there are so many, they need to be categorised and ordered first. This is going to take a while and so it’s another project on the backburner. In the meantime, I came across this description of September in the novel which was begging to be made into a short video:

“I was born in September, and love it best of all the months. There is no heat, no hurry, no thirst and weariness in corn harvest as there is in the hay. If the season is late, as is usual with us, then mid-September sees the corn still standing in stook. The mornings come slowly. The earth is like a woman married and fading; she does not leap up with a laugh for the first fresh kiss of dawn, but slowly, quietly, unexpectantly lies watching the waking of each new day. The blue mist, like memory in the eyes of a neglected wife, never goes from the wooded hill, and only at noon creeps from the near hedges.”

John McCarthy, who previously created our Suez Canal video, was up for making another and so eagerly got to work on it, spending a day in a forest to capture the necessary shots. My brief was to create slow lingering shots so that Lawrence’s evocative descriptions took precedence; to not be on the nail when matching images to text but rather to capture the mood and feeling of the season. I find myself swaying as I type this. Once more he’s done a smashing job.

Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885 and each September sees a variety of events hosted as part of the D.H. Lawrence Festival – of which I am a council member. This year this includes a Lawrence/Leavis Day of talks followed by a birthday lecture by Keith Cushman entitled: ‘Affirmation and Anxiety in Lady Chatterley’s Lover’. As with any work you produce, being time specific is one way of generating interest.

The quote also means a lot to me because of the references to ‘the corn still standing in stook’. I grew up in a mining village south east of Nottingham and our street backed right out onto corn fields. My childhood was spent getting scratches from corn and dodging Combine Harvesters whereas my fiancé would help her father erect stooks when he worked seasonally as a farm labourer.

One of our favourite activities in summer is to laze about in fields listening to birdsong and watching the farmers cut the hay when they know there’s a few days of sunshine and it can be safely left out to dry. On such occasions we’ve witnessed an owl meandering low through the fields on the hunt for field mice and counted the vast array of plants and flowers growing in the hedgerow. All of which helps transport us momentarily from the 24/7 thrust of technocratic culture into a simpler and calmer world where it’s ok to pause and observe. And because of Lawrence, I now want to know the name of every plant and flower I’m looking at. This is what good literature does. It broadens your horizons, it makes you restless and inquisitive, it helps you see the world in a different light.

Further reading

If you want to know why you shouldn’t mess about with Combine Harvesters read Joe Speedboat by Tommy Wieringa
For information about the D.H. Lawrence festival see the dhlawrencesociety.com
If you want to learn how to identify wild flowers visit nhbs.com
Melissa Harrison’s podcast The Stubborn Light of Things is a good starting point for learning more about nature visit melissaharrison.co.uk
For an interesting interpretation of Lawrence’s first novel see ‘(R)evolutionary Fears and Hopes in The White Peacock‘ at Études Lawrenciennes

April 30, 2021 James Walker letters, NTU PLacements, Photo Essay, Video

Suez Canal 1922 – when it was ok to stand and stare…

The recent blocking of the Suez Canal caused a right tiz, bringing global trade to a grinding halt and $1 billion in compensation claims from angry exporters. But 101 years ago life was a bit slower. The above video visualises D.H. Lawrence’s plod along the Suez. Back when life was very different and it was ok to stand and stare.

It was created in collaboration with John McCarthy, a student at Nottingham Trent University who got in contact for some experience of video editing and mentoring. I really admire students who take the initiative and push for that extra experience (this is a voluntary placement and is not assessed). We will begin working on another film at the end of May.

We sat down and I outlined the tone and pace of the film and the need to keep things befitting to the historical period. This was definitely a film that required longer shots and stills rather than flitting between images. Then John had the creative freedom to select the images. We then met up and discussed the first draft which required a minor edit.

His motivation for getting involved with the project was the ‘creative freedom’ and to help with his future career. John said: ‘In the future I would like to be a film editor, I really enjoy editing as its where the project really comes to life. I see it as the last part of directing as you can decide on which shots to use, the pacing, and how the film will end up looking in a final cut. You can really decide how the film will look.’

The benefit of a placement for John is he gets mentoring and advice and a platform to showcase his work. The benefit for us is new content for the D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre. It also forces me to come up with a new script and consider ways in which Lawrence’s work can shine a light on contemporary issues.

My hope with these placements is that students learn a bit about putting together a project and then have the confidence to go off and do something similar for themselves. Please find two minutes in your busy schedule to take a look or leave a comment on our YouTube channel. And if you do nothing else, make sure that you pause your 24/7 life for a few moments and enjoy life at 5mph as D.H. Lawrence did in 1922.

Extract of letter used in the film below:

“My Dear Rosalind,

Here we are on the ship – ten days at sea. It is rather lovely – perfect weather all the time, ship steady as can be, enough wind now to keep it cool…

I loved coming through the Suez Canal – 5 miles an hour – takes 18 hours – you see the desert, the sand hills, the low palm trees, arabs with camels working at the side. I like it so much….

Being at sea is so queer – it sort of dissolves for the time being all the connections with the land, and one feels a bit like a sea-bird must feel. It is my opinion that once beyond the Red Sea one does not feel any more that tension and pressure one suffers from in England – in Europe altogether…

It seems difficult in this world to get a new start – so much easier to make more ends.”

Further reading

The Cost of the Suez Canal Blockage (BBC)
Footage of the blocked ship (YouTube)
History of the Suez Canal (Britannica)
Suez Canal website (Suezcanal.gov)
Suez and the End of Empire (Guardian)

March 24, 2021October 12, 2022 James Walker Film, Project progress, Video

D.H. Lawrence and Dialect: The mardy bloke from Eastwood

The second artefact in the D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre is dialect. We’ve been slowly feeding an alphabet of dialect phrases through our Instagram account and producing videos like the above for our YouTube channel. The dialect essays are now on the project website too but will get a makeover as and when we get a chance. Below is some of the transcript for the above ‘mardy’ video. I guess the purpose of the video is to demonstrate (in a quick and accessible way) some of the ways in which Lawrence uses mardy in his work.

Although we’d love to claim mardy as our own, it’s used widely across the country – although it’s meaning varies. In Yorkshire and the Midlands, mardy means to be sulky or whining. This meaning is most likely derived from the dialect marred, which describes a spoilt, overindulged, or badly behaved child.

There are lots of mardy brats in Lawrence’s writing.

However, in the East Midlands, mardy can also mean to be non co-operative, bad tempered or terse in communication. By this definition, D.H. Lawrence was a gigantic sulk on legs. He raged against everyone and everything. And he had plenty of reasons to be mardy, particularly when his books were banned or censored. Take this letter to Edward Garnett in 1912 on finding out his manuscript for Sons and Lovers had been rejected by the publisher Heinemann.

“Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering, palsied, pulse-less lot that make up England today.

Ouch.

There are three ways you can pronounce mardy in the East Midlands. Mardeh, mardee or mard. Lawrence was very much of the mard variety on account of growing up in Eastwood which sits smack bang wallop on the border of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. In this region of the country, folk don’t like to fanny about with syllables and trim them off at any given opportunity.

Lawrence flips between these pronunciations in his novels. ‘Mardy’ is mentioned in Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Mr. Noon whereas the harder sounding ‘mard’ appears more frequently in The White Peacock, the short story ‘Rex’, the play The Daughter-in-Law and the poem The Collier’s Wife.

As you would expect from literature’s number one mard arse, there are lots of different words and expressions for being in a bad mood in Lawrence’s work. Here’s a few.

Most mardies happen when you have a row about summat. This is known as a shindy.

If during this shindy you persistently whine, you may be guilty of carneyin’.

Picture Mark Gertler Merry-go-Round (1916). Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)

Once you’re in a bad mood, you’re likely to go chuntering around the house.

Whining and whimpering is also known as pulamiting

If you are pulamiting in a particularly whining tone you may be accused of grizzling.

Press picture from Jack Gamble (dir) *The Daughter in Law* at Acola Theatre (2019)

Too much grizzling might turn you mean, which can result in mingy behaviour.

Photograph by Izaak Bosman at Sheffield Crucible.

This is likely to annoy people, or naggle them.

Most people who have a mardy tend to slope off on their own. But if your mardy has enraged you so much that you start screaming or crying, you have entered the world of scraightin.

Photography (Anne-Marie Duff) by Dean Chalkley. Press picture for Ben Power’s Husbands and Sons at National Theatre (22016)

Lawrence lived through World War One, survived the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, watched the landscape of his home destroyed by industrialisation, saw his books censored and banned, had his passport confiscated for marrying a German women, experienced persecution for his views, was labelled a pornographer, lived a nomadic life in self-imposed exile, and was plagued by ill health all his life. If anyone earned the right to be mardy, it was he.

Further Reading

The D.H. Lawrence Dialect Alphabet (memorytheatre.co.uk)
Thar’t a Mard Arse (memorytheatre.co.uk)
Nottingham Dialect: Ducks and Mardy (memorytheatre.co.uk)
What is the Nottingham dialect and where does it come from? (memorytheatre.co.uk)
Lawrence and Dialect (memorytheatre.co.uk)

February 8, 2021January 19, 2021 James Walker NTU PLacements, Photo Essay, Video

Student Essay: Dialect in the work of DH Lawrence

As part of our memory theatre project, we have created space for students at Nottingham Trent University to explore their own interpretations of Lawrence’s work. Here Jonathan Lucas explores Lawrence’s use of dialect as part of his final year English dissertation.

DH Lawrence had a special relationship with his native dialect, using the local vernacular speech of the mining community in his hometown Eastwood. Dialect acts as a prominent and dynamic symbol in many of his works, infusing depictions of his childhood experience with a certain raw authenticity that transcends words on a page.

In a late poem entitled ‘Red-herring’, Lawrence describes himself and his siblings as ’in-betweens’ and ‘little nondescripts’ speaking the Received Pronunciation they learned from their mother, Lydia, inside the house and the less respectable dialect, of their father Arthur and the rest of the town, outside it.

The breach between these two forms of speech had a significant impact on Lawrence’s perception of relationships between masculine and feminine, which he expresses in his semi-autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers. To portray the rift in his upbringing, Lawrence based the characters of Walter and his wife Gertrude on his own parents, featuring intense bi-dialectic confrontations between the two, with Walter speaking in Eastwood dialect and Gertrude speaking in Received Pronunciation.

In both Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow, there is an impulse, largely associated with women, to break out of the parochial community that they feel trapped in. In a community marked off from the wider world through distinctive ways of speaking, characters such as Gertrude provide an alternative to the mould through their speech, mirroring Lydia and her desire to secure respectability for her sons, beyond the community of Eastwood. Lydia’s efforts worked as Lawrence’s ability to code switch from dialect to Received Pronunciation assisted in his transposed success, especially when he won a prestigious Nottinghamshire County scholarship to Nottingham High School, an extraordinary achievement for the son of an Eastwood miner.

Lawrence would go on to travel the world, escaping the mining community that would become the focus of much of his work. His dialect had personal connotations of primitive, masculine energy that he associated with his father – which he makes reference to in his essay ‘Nottingham and the mining country’: “The life was a curious cross between industrialism and the old agricultural England of Shakespeare and Milton and Fielding and George Eliot. The dialect was broad Derbyshire, and always ‘thee’ and ‘thou.’ The people lived almost entirely by instinct; men of my father’s age could not really read.”

The rudimentary essence of dialect is affectionately expressed in the description of the miners in Women in Love: “Their voices sounded out in strong intonation, and the broad dialect was curiously caressing to the blood. It seemed to envelop and run in a labourer’s caress, there was in the whole atmosphere, a resonance of physical men, a glamourous thickness of labour and maleness surcharged in the air.” The physicality of the miners’ bodies is what makes their dialect speech so powerful that it ‘caresses the blood’. The thick dialect courses through the miners’ veins and evaporates in the vibrations of their voices, creating an atmosphere humid with ‘a resonance of physical men’.

The notion of dialect being embedded into one’s blood as a pulse of instinctive life is something Lawrence was vocal about early on in his career, exemplified in a letter when he tells Blanche Jennings that his “verses are tolerable-rather pretty, but not suave; there is some blood in them.” Referring to the integrity within his use of un-refined words and syntax as ‘blood’ highlights how essential Lawrence considered dialect to be in his body of work. In the same letter, Lawrence goes on to say that he prioritises “sincerity, and a quickening spontaneous emotion” in his writing, a sense of immediate passion which is represented through dialect.

Lawrence’s poem ‘The Drained Cup’ ascribes dialect to a woman to show that the raw primitive instinct of his father is not exclusive to males. By using the same deliberately unrefined and explicit language as before, but through a female persona dealing with her lover’s unfaithfulness, Lawrence criticises masculine primitive instinct: “A man like thee can’t rest till the last of his spunk goes out of ‘im into a woman”. This string of monosyllabic words leading to the disyllabic “woman” illuminates how all of the lover’s masculine energy, his “spunk”, is focused towards women, thereby being impotent in the absence of a woman to direct it to.

This is reinforced later in the poem when ‘spunk’ then yields to ‘blood’: “Tha’rt one o’ th’ men as has got to drain-an I’ve loved thee for it. Their blood in a woman, to the very last vain” – this reduces men to their material substance – ‘spunk’ and ‘blood’ are all that men are good for in this instance.

Using dialect, Lawrence expresses the unrestrainable nature of humans, articulating obsessions with immediate and physical reality, exploring the collective primitive instinct that is shared by all but repressed by some and embraced by others – regardless of gendered boundaries constructed by society.

Dialect is the second artefact in the D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre. Visit our project website to see contextual essays by Natalie Braber

December 7, 2020October 12, 2022 James Walker Photo Essay, Project progress, Video

Our second artefact is Dialect…

The second artefact in the D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre is dialect. We will be posting content on our website over the next couple of months. Here’s why we think dialect is important.

During lockdown people have been doing really creative stuff, like playing the mandolin while roller-skating or learning to bake sourdough while blindfolded. We, on the other hand, have been counting how many times D.H. Lawrence uses the greeting ‘duck’ in his work.

On one level, this is the kind of futile distraction that epitomises lockdown. But it has a more serious function as well. How important was dialect in his work? What function did it serve? How successful was he in using it? Geoffrey Trease, for example, believes Lawrence’s best writing was dialogue in his plays. As his earlier plays are set in mining communities, they all use a lot of dialect.

One of the best known examples of dialect in Nottingham is duck. It’s ok to greet anyone with duck – irrespective of their age, gender or any other ism you can think of. This is something I previously explored in the BBC Radio 4 series Tongue and Talk: The Dialect poets. Across his novels, plays, poems and short stories, Lawrence references ‘duck’ 15 times in total. It appears most in his debut novel, The White Peacock, with four mentions.

In the short film above, lovingly edited together by Izaak Bosman, we’ve asked various people to read these quotes out to give you a flavour of the Notts/Derbyshire accent. These voices are drawn from different areas, including Mansfield, Wollaton, Sherwood, Southwell, Eastwood and beyond. Some are read by born and bred locals, others have moved here from different cities and countries.

We’re currently working on another dialect video and have asked members of Lawrence Country, an Alt-Country & folk band from the Bagthorpe Delta, to read it out. We love what they do and how they incorporate the sentiments and landscapes of Lawrence’s life and work into their songs, so this was an excuse to collaborate.

Dialect is the second artefact for our memory theatre and these videos will accompany contextual essays on language by Natalie Braber. We’ve also created a dialect alphabet using words directly used in Lawrence’s work. This is being used in the ‘Questioning the Canon’ module at Nottingham Trent University where students are being asked to create their own stories using words from the alphabet and to find equivalent words from their own region.

The Dialect Alphabet (which is being released on our Instagram and Twitter accounts before the website) has already caused much debate. For example, for ‘A’ we selected addle. However, some people have asked why we didn’t plump for ‘Ayup’ which is the standard greeting for hello in Notts. The reason for this is simple: No matter how ubiquitous this expression is in everyday language it doesn’t appear anywhere in Lawrence’s work.

Dialect serves many functions. It can be used to denote a position of class, education and work. Given these influences, dialect is subject to change. For example, the last operating deep coal mine in the UK, Kellingley colliery, closed in December 2015. As industries decline, the names for tools and working practice slowly lose relevance and a whole way of life is slowly eroded.

For Jackie Greaves, a former guide at the Birthplace Museum, dialect and accent are about belonging. Hearing the Eastwood accent spoken is comforting and integral to identity. But not everyone approves of these sentiments. The philosopher, Stephen Alexander, is suspicious of whether phallic tenderness – the attempt to directly translate feelings and desire through language – can ever be truly authentic. Nor does he like the idea of ‘small groups of people – tribes – retreating into semi-private languages in order to uphold some narrow identity and exclude others’. Stephen has also submitted an artefact to our memory theatre which will be published later next year.

Whatever our thoughts on dialect, Lawrence was arguably the first author to write from the ‘inside’ about life in mining communities. He gave validity to the lives he described, paving the way for critics such as Raymond Williams to later declare that ‘culture is ordinary’. Language is political. On the most basic level, some people have the power to speak and others don’t. But a further nuance of this issue is how you speak – the tone, emphasis, choice of words.

Please visit www.memorytheatre.co.uk to see the artefacts in our memory theatre

June 3, 2019October 12, 2022 James Walker Heritage, letters, novels, Video

English PEN launch a crowdfunding campaign to keep an annotated copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover

It’s fair to say that British culture is defined by indecision. Presently, this is most evident with Brexit. On June 23, 2016 17.4 million voters (51.9 percent of the votes cast), backed leaving the EU while 16.1 million voters (48.1 percent of votes cast), favoured staying. The referendum proved one thing: the country was completely split. Nobody was entirely sure what they wanted. And so that split continues now, with talk of a second referendum and the countless permutations of possible exits. This has led the Tory party to implode as they squabble over who should be the next non-elected PM. We shouldn’t be surprised, though. This indecision was prevalent during the Civil War. In 1649 we executed Charles I for treason; had a very puritanical republic for eleven years under Oliver Cromwell; then restored Charles II to the throne in 1660.

As a nation, we oscillate with ease between seemingly binary opposites. We switch positions like musical chairs, and when the chairs have gone, we sit on the floor. I mention this because English PEN have launched a crowdfunding campaign to keep an annotated copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the UK. The copy was annotated by Lady Dorothy Byrne, wife of the Hon. Sir Laurence Byrne, the presiding judge of the 1960 obscenity trial against Penguin books.

The Arts minister, Michael Ellis, has determined that the book should stay in the UK and not be exported abroad. It is now deemed a national treasure, part of our literary heritage. The irony is not wasted on Lawrence scholars, given that the British government did everything it could to keep the novel out of print for so long. Lawrence was of regular interest to the censor. Other novels, poetry collections and a set of thirteen painting were all deemed unfit for public purpose, with copies of The Rainbow burned and the paintings locked up in a prison cell. It is little wonder that Lawrence dedicated so much energy towards getting out of England as quickly as he could and as far away as he could – travelling across Europe, Australia, and the Americas.

Philippe Sands QC, President of English PEN, said:

“D.H. Lawrence was an active member of English PEN and unique in the annals of English literary history. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was at the heart of the struggle for freedom of expression, in the courts and beyond. This rare copy of the book, used and marked up by the judge, must remain in the UK, accessible to the British public to help understand what is lost without freedom of expression. This unique text belongs here, a symbol of the continuing struggle to protect the rights of writers and readers at home and abroad.”

The copy was recently sold at auction to an overseas bidder for £56,250. English PEN have created a ‘Go Fund Me’ page to match the bid and keep it in Blightly. It is with this in mind that we have produced another short film for you that addresses parochialism and Lawrence’s views of the British. Written in 1924, Lawrence was infuriated that “an island no bigger than a back garden” should have such an inflated sense of grandeur. How true that sentiment remains today.

In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence’s life through artefacts to try to understand this complex writer. How do we represent the Lady Chatterley Trial? How do we determine what is obscene and what should be censored? In 2019 we begin building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence’s savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact get involved and submit ideas here

February 25, 2019October 12, 2022 James Walker Poetry, Video

Promo video: Dreams

Dreams video created by Izaak Bosman.

Dreams

All people dream, but not equally.
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their mind,
Wake in the morning to find that it was vanity.

But the dreamers of the day are dangerous people,
For they dream their dreams with open eyes,
And make them come true.

According to D.H. Lawrence we all dream, but some dreamers are more unequal than others. There are those who dream at night with their eyes shut, and those who dream in the sun with their eyes wide open. Before we examine this a little deeper, let’s take a moment to reflect on the purpose of sleep given that it has become such a hot topic of late.

Lack of sleep can make us fat. It can increase the risk of a stroke. It can cause depression, etc – you get the picture. Whereas plenty of shuteye can improve concentration and productivity. Sleep functions as a kind of housekeeper that removes toxins in your brain that build up while you are awake. According to neuroscientist Matthew Walker (no relation), lack of suboptimal shut-eye levels can also have an effect on your testicles, and whether you live into your mid 60s. All of this got me thinking about my dad who proudly got by on 4-5 hours a sleep a night. For him, sleeping was an affront to life. You made the most of everyday and maximised the hours. He was overweight, had a stroke and died at 67. But he never suffered from depression and there was nothing wrong with his testicles – he had eight children. He was incredibly productive – running his own business because he hated people telling him what to do. His downfall wasn’t lack of sleep. It was a love of cigars, Mars bars and quadruple whiskies.

I don’t care much for the latest lifestyle tip. I’m old enough to have read that drinking wine is good for your health only for it to be reinvented as middle-class smack. Woe betide anyone taking more than two glugs on a school night. Lawrence would certainly scoff at such advice having lived his entire life in denial at his own poor health. The mere mention of a doctor sent him into a rage. So I doubt he would care to be told how many hours kip he needed to sleep each night.

Dreams, on the other hand, are more complex. They are either a weird by-product of sleep – like plastic is to oil, or some kind of clever programming that functions to preserve the brain, a bit like how a screensaver protects computer monitors from phosphor burn-in when not being used.

Our brains digest so much information throughout the day that it has to be processed somehow. Take this blog. As I type my brain is also observing a messy desk with coffee stains, the picture of a dinosaur pinned to the wall behind the monitor, tuning into overheard Brexit debates in the office. This irrelevant data has to be classified, ordered and expunged. Dreams, then, are a bit like C Cleaner. They defrag. They take all of this collected information and mash it together into a surreal narrative. In this respect, dreams are incredibly democratic as all of the non-essential data gets a more prominent role when we hit the pillow. Tonight I’ll be dreaming of being chased by a coffee slurping dinosaur screaming ‘remain and you’ll die. Leave and you’ll be free’.

Lawrence wasn’t a fan of democracy, believing, like Nietzsche, that levelling down dimmed the light of those destined to lead. As abhorrent as that might sound to modern ears – and clearly it does have its problems – it needs to be seen in context. Lawrence’s work was censored, banned and vilified for daring to offer alternative ways of living on Planet E. The nation as a democratic ideal was responsible for an ugly passivity that brought about harm to the environment and stifled spiritual growth. Modernity claimed to bring about progress but all this meant was the destruction of the natural landscape, as well as producing bullets and bombs that would kill millions of people in the trenches.

Lawrence had no time for resting his head on a pillow and taking refuge in sleep. There were too many battles to be fought in daylight. We see this in his restlessness, making his way across the globe in search of Rananim, settling nowhere for more than two years, refusing to own property because he knew possessions ended up possessing you. We see it time and again in his novels, not least in Kangaroo where Richard Somers outlines ‘a new religious idea’ that ‘must gradually spring up and ripen before there could be any constructive change. And yet he felt that preaching and teaching were both no good, at the world’s present juncture. There must be action, brave, faithful action: and in the action the new spirit would arise.’

This is why Lawrence remains relevant today. He was a dangerous person in a peaceful sense. He dared to dream with his eyes wide open.

In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence’s life through artefacts to try to understand this complex writer. How do we convey Lawrence’s ideas about dreaming with your eyes wide open when it’s a lot easier to keep them shut? In 2019 we begin building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence’s savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact get involved and submit ideas here

Other promo videos